Child-Care Advocates Hope Relief Is in Sight : Grant Application, ‘Year of Child’ Could Bring S.D. Up to Par With Peers

Two weeks after San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor dedicated 1989 to the city’s children, the City Council has taken its first halting steps toward addressing the region’s longstanding child-care dilemma.

Child-care advocates, who have been working to raise the need for quality child care from obscurity to a major public and corporate concern, are hopeful that O’Connor’s political clout and the increasing national visibility of the day-care issue may at last result in some progress.

At the same time, they worry that the effort will become mired in the bureaucratic inertia and private-sector neglect that has kept San Diego lagging behind other major cities in devising innovative approaches to providing child care.

“The need is obvious, and it has been a growing need for some time,” said Jean Brunkow, executive director of the YMCA’s Childcare Resource Service, and the leader of the county’s small band of child-care advocates. “The discussion is . . . on what should be done and who should take responsibility.”

Acting on O’Connor’s State of the City address declaration that 1989 is the “Year of the Child,” the council Tuesday applied for a $25,000 grant to fund creation of a master plan for child care. The issues of child care and the need for a child-care coordinator were referred to a council committee for study and were included in the grant application.

But even if the city is one of 10 grant winners among 150 jurisdictions competing for funds, (the County Board of Supervisors and several other cities in the county are in the running), the master plan won’t be completed until Dec. 31, the last day of the year that O’Connor dedicated to the city’s children.

While they are encouraged that the city is taking steps to hire a child-care coordinator--cities from Davis to Los Angeles to San Marcos have had such positions for years--child-care advocates believe that San Diego could begin addressing the need for child care tomorrow, instead of waiting for completion of a master plan.

“People are having meetings all over the place,” said Barbara Chernofsky, a board member of the Family Day Care Assn., which represents 1,000 of the 5,000 family day-care providers in the county. “Nobody’s doing a goddamn thing. They’re meeting and they’re meeting and they’re talking.”

‘Don’t Need Another Study’

“We have enough information as to what’s needed and what the problems are and where the money needs to be spent,” said Veronica Welch, chairwoman of the Child Care Coordinating Council. “We don’t need to do another study.”

Ross McCollum, the city’s community program administrator, responded that “we don’t know how to address (child-care concerns) and, as a result, we haven’t addressed them. . . . I think what will come out of this plan is a series of programs and then a decision on which one we’re going to put our energies into, as opposed to hiring a person and then saying, ‘What do we want to do with this person?’ ”

Although O’Connor objects, Councilman Ron Roberts backs precisely the opposite approach. His staff has been informed that the entire grant could be used to hire a coordinator, and he said he will pursue that idea if the state funding is provided.

“It wouldn’t bother me if we used the whole thing to hire a coordinator,” he said. “Get somebody out there actually doing something. . . . Say, ‘What is your work program for the year? Good. That’s the master plan.’ ”

Child-care advocates simply want the city to begin to address the shortages they have bemoaned for years, concerns that fell largely on deaf ears until the continuous increase of women in the work force pushed the issue into the headlines, particularly during last year’s presidential campaign.

‘Latchkey Children’

The Childcare Resource Service estimates that 92,238 San Diego County children lack day care--nearly twice the 50,768 licensed slots available, according to a June, 1987, report by the child-care subcommittee of the county’s Commission on Children and Youth. (At the time the report was compiled, 11,212 of those licensed spaces were not available because providers had dropped out.)

Of those, an estimated 48,000 to 63,000 are the infamous “latchkey children,” school-age youngsters who spend their afternoons unsupervised or alone because their parents work and cannot arrange after-school care, the resource service estimates.

The remaining 30,000 are evenly divided between infants and preschoolers, with infants far more difficult to place in formal child care. The 56 licensed day-care centers in the county willing to accept infants have just 98 of them, according to the subcommittee report. Most infants are placed in family day-care homes or informal arrangements with baby-sitters.

Availability of child care varies drastically among sections of the county and is inextricably linked to parents’ ability to pay. Private child-care centers in affluent North County locales have little difficulty filling slots; in poor sections of San Diego, providers go begging for children.

“South of Mission Valley to the border, there’s probably not more than a dozen centers that are actually at full capacity, and they range clear down to half-capacity,” said W. James Bumiller, former president of the defunct San Diego Chapter of the Pre-School Assn., which represented private for-profit and nonprofit day-care centers. “Above Mission Valley . . . half the centers in that area are at capacity.

Overall, private centers operate at just 70% to 75% of capacity, primarily because parents can’t afford to pay for child care, he said. Private day-care centers, most of which do not turn profits, charge higher rates than in-home providers because most must pay off hefty mortgages, Bumiller said.

Child care, now the third-largest expense in a family budget, after shelter and food, costs the average parent $3,000 a year, according to national statistics. While 10% of gross income is considered an affordable share of family income to devote to child care, poor families may be faced with spending 20% to 30% of their income on child care, or doing without it entirely, Brunkow said.

A single woman earning $5.04 an hour would spend 30% of her income on child care for a single child, the subcommittee report notes. Placing more than one child would be impossible, it says.

In San Diego, full-time care for an infant ranges from $75 to $125 a week, full-time care for a preschooler costs $55 to $100 per week, and after-school care for a school-age child ranges from $1.50 to $3 an hour, according to Childcare Resource Service estimates.

While no one knows precisely how many families require subsidies, the need is considerable. Approximately 270 families in the county receive subsidies under one state program for the poor. More than 1,000 are on the waiting list.

“Overall, I think that even if we had all the slots we needed, they would not meet the needs because of affordability,” Welch said. “A lot of people have their 8-year-old or 7-year-old go home and wait for them because they can’t afford day care.”

Variation in Quality

The available care varies widely in quality. While there is some training for workers in child-care centers, the county’s 5,000 family day-care providers are not required to show any special competence in caring for children, knowing first aid, providing nutritious meals or working well with parents, said Chernofsky, who also operates a consulting business training family day-care providers.

Underpaid and isolated in a highly stressful occupation, 49% of family day-care providers quit every year. Fortunately, they are replaced by new providers, Chernofsky said.

“What’s lacking is required training,” she said. “People finish my class--and I’m bragging here--they say, ‘How can anyone provide day care without taking this class?’ ”

The city also is lagging in employer-sponsored child-care programs, which can range from offering a benefits package that provides child-care payments to establishing an on-site or near-site care center, sometimes in cooperation with other companies. The county has only five of those, said Brunkow, the resource service executive director.

The city’s master plan proposes to address all of these problems and more, including the red tape and expense that keeps profit-oriented centers from opening. O’Connor is promising expanded recreation programs for latchkey children and an emphasis on addressing the child-care needs of city employees, perhaps by siting a child-care center in the proposed new Civic Center.

“If the city of San Diego makes a commitment to meeting the child-care crisis, we can do it,” Brunkow said. “But we really have to believe that a commitment to our children is important and makes a difference.”